Novelist Eimear McBride's debut book famously went from being nine years left on the shelf to the hottest text on the literary scene. Now it has taken on a new life in the form of a play coming to this year's Norfolk and Norwich Festival. Arts correspondent Emma Knights finds out about A Girl is a Half-formed Thing's journey from the page to the stage.

While multi-award winning writer Eimear McBride originally trained as an actress she never dreamt of her novel, A Girl is a Half-formed Thing, becoming a play until an Irish theatre company got in touch.

Now, alongside the novel scooping top accolades such as the Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction, it has been turned into a play that is following in the book's success with five star reviews and sell-out performances.

'I think it was maybe February last year when Annie Ryan, the director, asked if we could have a chat about her taking up the performance rights,' said 38-year-old Eimear.

'I was quite sceptical at first because I'd written it as a novel and I wasn't particularly interested in seeing it adapted, but Annie persuaded me, and when she said she wanted to do it as a one-woman piece that piqued my interest.

'I originally trained as an actress so I am interested in theatre, and I was kind of intrigued by the idea.'

The novel takes readers into the mind of an Irish girl before she is born until the age of 20, and is written in a unique style described as being 'not so much a stream of consciousness as an unconscious railing against a life that makes little sense.'

Set against the backdrop of the crushing Catholicism and deprivation of her childhood, at the story's heart is the girl's relationship with her brother and the shadow cast by his childhood brain tumour.

The 203-page story runs for seven-and-a half hours as an audio book, so director Annie Ryan and Dublin theatre company The Corn Exchange had their work cut out when they began turning it into a play.

Eimear said: 'It was very tricky but Annie was very diplomatic about it and really kept me in the loop, regularly sent me drafts and was very willing to discuss concerns I had. I, in turn, tried not to be too precious about it, because I did understand that to adapt it, it had to work in a very different way, and that she would have to cut a huge amount.'

Eimear went to the first week of rehearsals and this is when she first met Aoife Duffin, the actress playing the main character who in the book readers only ever know from her inner thoughts.

'This was kind of the difficulty for me when granting the rights in the first place, the girl being embodied when in the book you never see her from the outside, you only experience her world from the inside,' said Eimear.

'I imagine that was the biggest challenge for The Corn Exchange.'

While nervous about hearing the initial read-through of the script, Eimear said she was reassured from the moment Aoife began to read that the actress really understood the 'complex and conflicted' character Eimear had created.

'As soon as Aoife started to read I knew that it would be all right, I knew that she understood the language. She read it very differently to how I would read it, but I knew she understood it and I knew from my own training that the actor has to make the part their own.'

The next time Eimear saw the show was at its second preview in Dublin.

'It was so nerve-wracking. We didn't tell Aoife I was going to be in [the audience] until afterwards - I think that was an act of kindness - and I thought she was wonderful. I saw it three times that first week and she just became stronger and stronger. She really succeeded in making it her own.

'I think they [The Corn Exchange] have made the show something else. It is different to the book but it does share the same soul as the book.'

The play was a hit at last year's Dublin Theatre Festival and received five-star acclaim in national newspapers.

'I'm very glad for them that they have had the success that they have. It's completely deserved,' said Eimear.

'I think Aoife is extraordinarily talented. It's a real pleasure to watch her. It's a mark of her talent that I can watch the show and get lost in it and not sit there thinking, 'they've missed this bit, they've missed this bit.''

It is particularly apt the show's UK premiere will be at the Norfolk and Norwich Festival because Eimear's husband, William Galinsky, is the festival's artistic director, and it was Norwich-based Galley Beggar Press which first published A Girl is a Half-formed Thing.

Eimear, who grew up in Ireland and now lives in Norwich's Golden Triangle with William and their three-year-old daughter Eadaoin, said: 'There's an element of homecoming to it coming to the Norfolk and Norwich Festival which was in many ways the reason why my book got published in the first place.

'We moved here because William got the job, and otherwise I would never have met Henry Layte [who at the time was part of Galley Beggar Press].'

Eimear is now working on her second novel which she said 'is and it isn't' similar to her first.

'A Girl is a Half-formed Thing was written the way it was to tell that story very specifically, and so nothing can ever be told in the same way again, but I'm still interested in using that sort of perspective and trying to make language work in different ways to tell a story,' she said.

And when asked if there were likely to be any more adaptations of her first book, Eimear said: 'There is some film interest but nothing I've committed to. It would have to be the right person at the right time and with the right idea.'

A Girl is a Half-formed Thing is at Norwich Playhouse from May 12 until May 16. Tickets £15 - visit www.nnfestival.org.uk or call 01603 766400.

Norfolk and Norwich Festival is May 8 to 24.